


The Gravekeeper's Apprentice

by Azzandra



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe, Death, Dimestore Gothic Romance, Frankenstein AU, Gen, Horror, Hubernie Week 2020, Necromancy for fun and profit, does it count as major character death if the character comes back to life?, yeah idk but there sure is some death in it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:07:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23985043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: It started on a dark and stormy night... (In which Bernadetta makes friends with a dead man)Written for Hubernie Week Day 1: Stitches
Relationships: Bernadetta von Varley & Hubert von Vestra, Bernadetta von Varley/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 14
Kudos: 60
Collections: Hubernie Week





	The Gravekeeper's Apprentice

It had gotten late as Bernadetta worked, and thus increasingly darker, but the storm raging outside would have likely darkened even the noon sky. Rain was falling in sheets, and every time it thundered, jars rattled on the shelves. Luckily, the lightning always came a few seconds beforehand, a helpful bit of warning so Bernadetta didn't flinch at the sound of thunder and ruin her own work.

She should have stopped, and picked this up again in the morning, but she was so close to done, that she wanted to finish before she lost her nerve. Squinting in the lamplight, she continued at her task, stitch by stitch, quick and precise like she was doing her needlework. This was not so different, she tried to tell herself.

She'd just finished tying off the last knot when the storm finally moved completely overhead. This time, the lightning flashed the same instant that thunder cracked, sudden, bright and loud all at once. Bernadetta yelped, flailed, knocked over the lamp with her elbow, and sent it crashing to the floor, where it sputtered out. The room was drenched into pitch black. The sound of the rain pelting against the window felt all the louder for it.

"Stupid, stupid Bernie!" she scolded herself as she turned around, to grope blindly along the shelves, looking for another lamp. 

She waited with knuckles clenched along the edge of a shelf as lightning flashed, and in that split second of light--with shadows falling strange and sharp, with thunder loud enough to wake the dead--she at least saw the object she sought. She lunged for the lamp, and with the little magic she could do, she called a spark of fire and lit it.

She sighed in relief entirely too soon. As she turned around with the lamp in her hand, the warm light from it fell onto the worktable, and this time she shrieked in truth--not a startled yelp, but a full-throated scream of terror was ripped from her chest. She dropped this lamp as well, and it smashed against the ground, shattering as the flame extinguished. She pressed herself back against the bookshelves, the wood digging against her shoulderblades, and she froze. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears. In the darkness, the utter stillness of the room, she began to doubt what she'd seen--started to convince herself that she'd imagined it, and she was wrong.

Then the lightning flashed again, a long second which melted into a small eternity, and she saw by it every detail: the silhouette sitting upright on the worktable, the ghostly pallor of the man's skin, the hair falling over half his face, and the long Y-shape of the stitches that Bernadetta had just finished working on, stark and unmistakable across the torso. 

And in the same flash of white, sterile light, the man titled his head, and looked at her as well.

Bernadetta fled the room shrieking.

* * *

As she was huddled under the writing desk in her room, Bernadetta buried her face against her knees and smothered a sob. She had to be quiet, so she wouldn't be found. She just had to be quiet, and the bad things would go away. Nothing could touch her in her own room, and he wouldn't find her if he couldn't hear her.

And anyway, Bernadetta had a lot of practice hiding and waiting for the monsters to go away.

She could stay there for days. Weeks. Forever.

There was a knock on the door. 

"Bernadetta," came Tomas' voice, "are you hiding in here again?"

Bernadetta found herself trembling too much to form a response. Tomas tapped the knob of his walking stick against the door again, the sound resounding through the empty halls of Varley Manor. It made Bernadetta worried of what might hear it... what might come.

"Do come out, my dear. Our guest is waiting."

Guest? _Guest_? Did Tomas not know there was a shambling abomination haunting the hallways? This was no time for guests!

Bernadetta scrounged up enough courage to rise and approach the door. She would warn Tomas and then crawl back into her hiding spot. Yet, when she cracked the door open, Tomas had already left. The hallway was empty, with no sign of guest or walking corpse alike. 

She slipped out as quietly as a mouse in the pantry. The door at the end of the hallway was closed, but haloed in light along the edges. She assumed that was where Tomas had to be, if only because there was nobody else inhabiting the manor anymore. Nobody but Tomas the gravekeeper, and cowardly Bernie, ever since the war swept through and everyone else had fled and abandoned the estate.

Well, and now whatever terrible thing Bernie had woken.

She reached the door without incident, and her hand hovered on the door handle for a moment as she heard Tomas' voice through the door, too low to make out words. Was he speaking to the guest?

Bernadetta quietly turned the handle, and poked her head in.

The only light came from the fireplace, its quiet crackle offering a warm counterpoint to Tomas' slow, soft voice. He was standing, speaking to someone sat in the high chair in front of the fire. Bernadetta couldn't see who, though at this point she was starting to grow curious. What guests could they possibly have in the middle of the night?

She approached just as quietly, Tomas' words growing more distinct.

"--magnificent results, for a vessel not specifically created for the purpose, though I suppose we will have to watch closely for signs of degeneration--"

There was a fervor to Tomas that Bernadetta had rarely seen, and a strange glint to his eyes; something hungry. She didn't fully understand what he was saying either, though that was not necessarily new. Tomas spoke often of things that went over Bernadetta's head. She mostly just nodded and did what he said.

She was nearly next to the chair when Tomas noticed her move out of the shadows. His words stopped, his manner turning back to that of a meek librarian so abruptly, that Bernadetta only just noticed the difference in posture compared to before.

"Ah, there you are," Tomas greeted. "Very good. Do make yourself useful, my dear, and fetch some proper clothing for our guest."

"O-okay!" Bernadetta said, before the strangeness of the request had time to sink in.

It was then that the guest leaned forward from his chair, and peered past the backrest to peer at Bernadetta.

Words choked in her throat, because this was-- this was the--

"Corpse!" Bernadetta shrieked, flailing and pointing. "Th-that's the-- Dead!"

Tomas, far from looking alarmed, gave a long-suffering sigh.

"Yes, Bernadetta," he confirmed. "Do be less coarse, child."

"S-sorry," she said, immediately pulling her hands close, and cradling them to her chest.

Her heart was hammering in panic, but Tomas seemed not a little bit concerned, and the... 'guest' even less so.

The dead man stared at her, face blank and passively observant, and but for the fact that he was capable of moving, there really was no other difference between him and a dead body. Bernadetta knew there couldn't be, because his heart was in a jar on Tomas' desk. That was something most people didn't come back from.

"I, um--" Bernadetta wrung her hands a bit more before finding her foothold in the conversation, "--I should be able to find something in the servant quarters. If-- he c-can... come along?"

She looked to Tomas, who nodded distractedly, and waved them off, and then back to the dead man, who did not seem to have any feelings about it one way or the other.

Yet, he did rise from the chair, unfolding himself into an impressive height that made Bernadetta blanch just a bit.

The stitches were still evident on his torso, the black thread standing out against the pallor of his skin. Why had she used black thread, Bernadetta scolded herself. What a stupid choice, the self-flagellating choir in her head continued. 

The dead man shuffled closer--he had a sheet around his waist, perhaps the same that had covered him on the worktable--and Bernadetta suddenly found another salient detail to focus on.

"Clothes!" she squeaked, face heating with embarrassment. "Right! Follow me!"

She turned on her heel, and all but fled through the door.

* * *

Clothing was not hard to find, the former inhabitants of the manor having fled without taking much of anything, though the fit was more the issue than anything. The dead man was tall and lanky, and Bernadetta had to recall who in the manor had similar proportions. She remembered one of the butlers shaped about the same--a tall man, dignified, one of her father's favorites for how meticulous he was in his work, and how firm-handed with the servants.

She tried not to think of the butler's cold eyes as she sorted through clothing, and found an entire stash of perfectly tailored black suits in his wardrobe.

She piled shirts and undergarments on the bed, and lined up pairs of shoes along the floor, all while chattering nervously about fit and quality, all while the dead man followed quietly behind.

It didn't occur to her until she was watching him silently buttoning his shirtsleeves to ask.

"Hey, um. I'm Bernadetta-- y-you probably know that by now but... You have a name too, right...?"

He paused, staring into the buttons on his cuffs like he was divining answers in them. Could he even talk? Tomas hadn't removed his tongue, that Bernadetta could recall. At least not where she'd seen it.

Oh, what if he had? Stupid Bernie, making things awkward again--!

Then, unexpectedly, a word dragged out of the dead man's chest, dry and croaking.

"Hubert," he said. And, with the disuse falling away from his voice, continued, "My name is Hubert. A pleasure to meet you, Bernadetta."

* * *

Hubert became, strangely enough, a fixture at Varley Manor.

Bernadetta didn't fully understand what he was doing there, except that she was sure he had no other place to go. She supposed it wasn't that surprising; it wasn't like she'd be there, either, if she had anywhere better to be. But war had upended everyone's life, and had left too many people with nowhere and nothing. And... well, there was also the matter that Hubert had been dead.

She was still trying to wrap her head around that, how Tomas could bring someone back to life by putting a weird stone in their chest. She knew it was part of his 'research', some esoteric branch of magic that Bernadetta thought herself too stupid to understand, but what kind of magic could do this sort of thing?

She found herself once again skulking uneasily around her childhood home. The world outside her bedroom had never been so welcoming to her, even in this house where she grew up-- especially in this house. But then, that meant she knew the floorboards that squeaked, the nooks and crannies where a child--or a very slim young woman--could squeeze in and hide until footfalls passed.

She still did the tasks that Tomas laid out for her: the cataloging of specimens, the transcription of notes. She tended the vegetable garden, and fished in the murky pond that had once been nothing but an aesthetic feature of the Varley gardens. 

She assumed Hubert would spend his days in Tomas' laboratory, or his study. But after the first few days, in which Tomas poked and prodded at him, Tomas mostly lost interest in Hubert.

"The experiment is nothing unless replicated," Tomas had declared, as he prepared the notes.

Bernadetta, who had been dusting the bookshelves, assumed she had been the one addressed, and blanched.

"Y-you mean you want to do that again?" she asked, wide-eyed as she turned towards Tomas.

"Naturally," Tomas replied, kindly as ever, and smiling without teeth. "We will go find new material tonight."

Bernadetta recalled what finding material had entailed the first time, because she had been the one with the shovel. A skirmish had passed nearby, leaving behind food for the crows, and food they had been indeed: their eyes pecked out, their flesh decayed under the hot Adrestian sun. A mass grave had also been dug, where the soldiers of the side that had presumably won the skirmish had been granted the small, dubious honor of being piled in and covered with shallow layers of dirt.

Yet, in spite of how quickly the fight had rolled through, someone had yet dug a single grave, away from the rest, and that was where they had found Hubert: his only gravestone a flat rock, unremarkable; still more than anyone else on that killing field had gotten in exchange for the lives they had lost.

Tomas had helped her hoist the body onto the cart, and up the stairs to his laboratory. He was remarkably solid, for such a seemingly frail old man, though perhaps he had simply been gripped by scientific fervor.

She had been there to assist as Tomas cut into the corpse, removed and rearranged the innards, added what he called the 'crest stone'. At the end, he had asked her to sew the body back up-- 'You've such a delicate hand for sewing,' he'd said. 'And I am but an old man with failing eyes.'

She had obeyed, of course. She never would have thought herself capable of all the things she did for Tomas, but war had changed that. War had changed many things. She had learned to swallow back her misgivings like bile.

Sometimes, she wondered if Tomas had ever been completely honest with her, calling himself a gravekeeper. It seemed he did not keep graves so much as plunder them of their residents. Yet, he spoke so convincingly of his experiments, of all the good this knowledge would do--

Perhaps if Tomas had been more like Bernadetta's father, if he screamed or put her down, or tied her up, Bernadetta would have been more inclined to distance herself. Yet as Tomas requested politely, as he spoke gently to her like one would speak to an easily spooked animal, as he thanked her for the smallest things, Bernadetta found it hard to deny anything he asked, until she was as deep in his sins as him.

Bernadetta might not have been as smart as some people, but she wasn't that stupid. She knew a point of no return once she'd passed it. And for all the things she'd done for Tomas, there was nobody else in the world who would accept her but him.

* * *

Bernadetta walked into the library the next day to find the heavy curtains had been pulled over the windows. She didn't understand why, though she stood before them for a while assessing a long tear along the hem, letting in a sharp blade of sunlight. She thought of mending it, now that she had noticed it, and considered thread colors.

She was so lost in thought, that she did not even notice the heavy shuffle of feet, until a cold hand fell to her shoulder.

She let out a full-body shriek. The hand retracted as if burned.

When she whipped around, she almost felt guilty for her behavior. Hubert stood, blinking down at her with a mix of shock and fascination on his face.

"You are louder than I expected," he said plainly.

"You shouldn't sneak up on people like that!" Bernadetta replied, flustered. "Or touch them with your creepy dead hands!"

Something shuttered in Hubert's face then; if there was no hurt in his expression, it was because he pulled it close and tucked it away somewhere deep inside, lest it see the light. His smile was sharp and clinical, an arrangement of expression, more than a reflection of real emotions. Bernadetta felt ashamed, because the motions of it were familiar; she had never thought to be the one to cause it, however.

"I'm sorry--" she said hastily.

"No," Hubert replied, and adjusted the cuffs of his coat, straightened his shoulders. "You are quite correct. I am sorry to have startled you. I will take my leave, then."

He walked off, leaving Bernadetta alone to stew in her guilt.

Next she saw him, he wore white gloves, perhaps plundered from that same butler's closet.

* * *

Next she saw him after that, his white gloves became stained with grave dirt.

Bernadetta didn't know if she should be grateful for it, but Tomas had insisted Hubert dig this time instead of her.

"Might as well make himself useful, eh?" Tomas had said, smiling the way he always did, without showing teeth.

Bernadetta had been at first too busy worrying about Tomas finding more use for Hubert than for her, but then, as they crossed the killing fields outside the manor, and located the mass grave again, she had plenty of time to stare at the back of Hubert's head, and wonder if Hubert even wanted to make himself useful.

She could not pinpoint exactly what perturbed her about Tomas and Hubert's dynamic, except that she was not certain Tomas considered Hubert anything more than a thing, ambulatory and useful, but perfectly acceptable to take apart again. And what held Hubert tied to Tomas, anyway? Something stitched into his chest, or the fear of judgment from someone who had taken care to bury Hubert apart? What could the luxury of a solitary grave mean when so many other dead were piled one over the other? That someone had cared, surely.

In Hubert's hands, the shovel bit deep into the earth. The task went faster than Bernadetta remembered it taking the previous times around.

Death had taken more time with this set of corpses, and Bernadetta could feel the stench of it like a physical thing, slamming into her through the mask she wore. She recalled how in a pile of fruit, the rot from one would creep into the others where they touched, and wondered if that was how a mass grave also worked. She had to stop wondering so she wouldn't sick up inside her mask.

The cart piled with material, as Tomas called it; the impersonal slabs of adulterated meat that Bernadetta tried hard not to think of as having been people at one point. It took a bit of magic to move the cart, but with no protest from its passengers, it moved. 

It seemed, in retrospect, harsh and unjust of her to have snapped at Hubert the way she did, when he had nothing more than the funeral parlor air of an undertaker's best work. If she hadn't known about the fact that he had been skewered clean through his torso, and then cut open by Tomas, and then stitched back up by her--would she even know he had been dead once?

* * *

Varley Manor would reek of formaldehyde for years, and Bernadetta spent an entire day trying to ensure she wouldn't.

She managed to drag a copper tub in the kitchen, and heat water on the stove, and scrubbed herself with soap until her skin was red and raw. She'd burned the clothing she wore while assisting Tomas, not even attempting to salvage them, and then, once she was back in the room, she still felt the odor of death and formaldehyde like a heavy presence, and began to consider that it was ingrained in the inside of her nostrils and she would never escape it.

For the first time in a long while, Bernadetta found walls constricting instead of protective. She puttered about her room for a while, flipping through pages of her old writing, trying to read and looping around the same paragraph without a word sinking in, she picked up her embroidery ring, and placed it down elsewhere in the room, she turned the plants in her window, and adjusted the paintings on her walls, and when she couldn't find a single activity to hold her interest, she turned to the door instead.

By reflex, she was always quiet when walking the halls of Varley Manor. When she'd been a child, it was because she did not want anyone to hear her as she ghosted through the house in the dead of night. Now, when there was hardly anybody to hear her, and certainly nobody who would care to stop her, she still kept quiet because the echoes bounces strangely against the walls. It was a tangible difference, between hallways empty because everyone was asleep, and a house empty because every was gone.

Bernadetta found her feet taking her to the library again.

The curtains had been pulled back, and a yellow, nearly-full moon poured cold light through the windows. The carpet was checkered by the grid of windowpanes, and the light reflected against the white walls of the library, catching on the outlines of the furniture.

She saw the shoes, first, because they poked out into the stretch of moonlight. As Bernadetta's eyes moved from the light and adjusted to the darkness, she traced the shape of Hubert's knobby knees, and the slump of his body in the armchair. His clothing was black against the floral upholstery of the chair, but his face was pallid enough to identify even in the dark of night.

"H-hello," Bernadetta squeaked out through the knot of fright in her throat.

There was a moment of complete stillness, amplified by Bernadetta's anticipation, and then Hubert leaned forward in the armchair, and the whites of his eye caught a glint of the light.

"Bernadetta," he drawled. "Shouldn't you be sleeping at this time of night?"

Bernadetta folded her arms across her chest, pulling her housegown tighter against the chill of the house. Her hair was still damn, and plastered to the back of her neck uncomfortably.

"Shouldn't you?" she retorted.

Hubert sat back slowly.

"I don't sleep anymore," he said, sounding more thoughtful than upset.

Bernadetta dry-swallowed, felt her shoulders hunch defensively. The first instinct was to always assume it had been something she'd done that caused anyone's problems, and assume that meant they hated her and would want her dead. But she'd been broken of the habit by Tomas, who had no patience for her histrionics.

She couldn't adequately explain why, and maybe it was a bit irrational, but the first time he'd looked at her and said 'Cease that, now,' his eyes had been cold and unfeeling as a snake's. And Bernadetta had never felt more like a small bird that could be swallowed up with nary a hiccup as in that moment. Words choked in her throat, and her feet froze to the floor, the way small animals reacted in the presence of something fully capable of eating them.

Looking back, she couldn't say whether it was an overreaction on her part, and Tomas had always been a kindly man who had generously provided her with company in exchange for her help, or whether she'd narrowly avoided some undefined but grave consequences by going quiet, and not annoying him further. Sometimes, at night, she went back and forth between thinking one or the other, and it did not feel like a sane thing to do.

"If you're having trouble sleeping, um, I think we have some sleeping powders--" Bernadetta offered haltingly.

"No," Hubert replied. "I thank you for the offer, but it isn't that I cannot sleep, it's that I do not sleep anymore."

"Maybe... you should ask Tomas..."

"And you think a creature such as that would help?"

Bernadetta did not know how to reply.

She wanted to say that of course Tomas would help, because he was a good person. But in the dark of night, it didn't feel quite true anymore. She had not quite had time to swing back to the conviction that he was a harmless old man, with the scent of death still heavy in her lungs.

"I'm sorry," she blurted out.

"I do not require pity."

"No, I-- I'm sorry for... being so mean the last time I was here. You didn't ask for--what happened to you, and you don't deserve that kind of treatment."

"Your apology is unnecessary, but appreciated."

They lapsed in a long silence, during which Bernadetta shifted from foot to foot. It felt like a strange note to leave the conversation off on.

"If you don't mind me asking," she began, paused, and when Hubert did not immediately snap at her, continued, "what is it that you do all night? Instead of sleeping?"

"I try to remember," Hubert replied.

"Remember? Remember what?"

"Something... important, I think," Hubert replied at length. "I have forgotten... something that once mattered to me a great deal."

"That's awful!" Bernadetta said. She had always hated the itchy feeling of a memory just out of her reach, and she could not imagine simply being stuck in that feeling all night instead of sleep. She didn't think it did Hubert any good, dead though he was. "Whenever I can't remember something, I try to think of something else for a while, and-- and sometimes I just spontaneously remember what I was forgetting. If... that makes sense?"

Hubert tilted his head, appeared to ponder the issue.

"I suppose it may not hurt," he said.

With a flick of the wrist and a spark of magic, he turned the lamp on his side-table on. 

Bernadetta closed her eyes against the sudden flare of firelight, and had to blink out spots. But when she looked at Hubert, he seemed more alive than anything. There was a pull to his lips that suggested a restrained smile, and his eyes were golden in the lamplight.

* * *

Dereliction looked romantic on Varley Manor. Former impeccably manicured gardens were overtaken by weeds, stalks of wildflowers and hardy dandelions that Bernadetta would have once watched gardeners exterminate with great prejudice. They speckled the overgrown grass cheerfully.

Barn swallows had also made nests under the edges of the manor's roof, where once they would have been smashed and cleared away. In the mornings, Bernadetta could sometimes see the swallows on the branches of the tree outside her window: they had trailing feathers like tailcoats, and she imagined them as dignified little butlers, now replacing the former staff of the manor. They reminded her of Hubert, amusingly enough; he too haunted the manor in dark suits, and the white shirt beneath that echoed a swallow's white belly.

He did not spend all his time in the library anymore, though when he ventured out he sometimes went on long walks, or disappeared to parts unknown. Yet, he couldn't be anywhere but on the manor grounds, because Bernadetta began running into him sometimes. when she was weeding the small vegetable garden, or sitting in the gazebo to sketch, she would see him as he walked across the garden paths like a lost specter, haunting a place that was not his to haunt.

She ran into him in the pantry once, as he scavenged some tea. The larders and pantry had been full when Bernadetta first returned to Varley Manor, having been left completely behind when the residents vacated. Some of the perishables had rotted, and Bernadetta had thrown out anything gone bad, and consumed anything that was close to it, but the larders had enough food to last one or two residents for a few years yet. The vegetable garden and the occasional fish Bernadetta caught in the pond were to supplement what otherwise would have felt like a dry and bland diet. Though at times, it did not feel Tomas cared one way or the other.

Hubert did not eat, as such. He had tried, but always retched everything back, along with a black substance that looked like coffee grounds.

"I enjoyed coffee, once," he confessed with a melancholy air, as he seemed to extract the memory from somewhere far away from him now. It must have been a bitter-sweet thing, to remember this detail, when more important things eluded him still.

Bernadetta was familiar with coffee. It was imported from somewhere far away--Brigid, maybe--and had had a kind of passing popularity with a discerning crowd before the war. Her father had purchased a sack of the stuff in order to impress guests; it was an expensive drink, after all.

She found the coffee, hidden in the forbidden corners of the pantry, and the beans kept fresh by a small enchantment on the sack.

Hubert walked in on Bernadetta attempting to operate a coffee grinder, and his eyebrows rose high.

"I've never done this before," Bernadetta blurted out, embarrassed.

"Then please, allow me," Hubert said, gently taking the coffee grinder away from her.

He spun the lever of the grinder with a practiced hand, and Bernadetta sat down at the table and watched, feeling awkward for not quite managing to surprise him.

Yet, he clearly knew what he was doing better than her, and when he poured her a cup of coffee as well, she had no choice but to accept it.

The taste was bitter; more bitter than Bernadetta was used to, but somehow perfectly fitting on the tongue. Almost sweet in contrast to the pungent presence of death that had wormed its way between the walls of the manor. Almost light, compared to the thoughts that kept Bernadetta awake. 

Hubert pushed the contained of sugar in her direction, and she added some to her coffee. Her thoughts were less bitter on the second sip.

* * *

Tomas was so absorbed in his work for the next few weeks, that Bernadetta barely saw him, unless she sought him out in the laboratory.

In the dark of the night, Bernadetta could have nightmares in which Tomas smiled, and his lips peeled back to reveal a snake's fangs, and his entire skin peeled back as he shed it, and something burst out from under it that was so much larger than the frame of the frail old man. But in the light of day, it was as if Bernadetta almost forgot about him.

He rarely even asked her help, instead turning her away from his laboratory on claims his work was too delicate, and she would be more hindrance than help. Bernadetta was relieved, and felt guilty that she was; felt guilty that he appeared in her nightmares.

The brimstone smell of magic hung heavier than the stench of death in the air of Varley Manor, so Bernadetta let it be.

"Do you know what Tomas is doing?" she asked Hubert one evening in the library.

Hubert looked up from the pages of a volume on magic, tsk'd dismissively.

"Something foolish, no doubt," Hubert replied.

"Why would you think that?" Bernadetta asked, putting down her embroidery ring. She was halfway through a swallow, and stuck the needle in the edge of the fabric so she wouldn't lose it as her attention shifted to Hubert.

"This is not the sort of magic anyone has done before, so I would no be able to tell you what precisely he means to achieve," Hubert replied. "Save that, apparently, I am a less than satisfactory result," he added, with a self-deprecating smirk as he gestured to his chest.

"Do you think he's trying to bring them to life?" Bernadetta asked, her voice falling to a reedy whisper.

"If he is," Hubert replied, "he will have even less success with his current batch of material than with me. They were considerably more ripe when he started out. We will not enjoy having them lurch about the house, losing bits all over the floor."

"Hubert! That's gross!" Bernadetta squealed. "Don't say things like that!"

"You're right, of course," he agreed dryly, "we mustn't curse it into existence."

Bernadetta squealed again and covered her ears.

But even so, she heard Hubert's deep laugh resounding through the library.

* * *

"You used to live here," Hubert said out of nowhere, one day.

"I live here now," Bernadetta replied, though she knew what he meant. 

She'd dragged a ladder all the way to the library, so she could take down the curtain that was torn, and mend it. Hubert held her ladder, though it was steady enough. 

"There is a small family portrait in one of the rooms," Hubert said. 

Bernadetta felt a hot needle of anxiety lance through her belly; he must have been to her parents' room, where Mother usually kept the portrait she'd commissioned when Bernadetta had been younger and brighter and happier. She didn't know for certain, because that was one room she still feared to enter. She was immediately apprehensive at the thought of Hubert going in there, because it felt as though she had brought a friend home and allowed him to misbehave. 

It was strange that she still feared punishment from people long gone. But Hubert had been dead once, too, hadn't he? And he'd returned, albeit not to the place he belonged.

She fumbled. The curtain rod fell to the ground, curtain and all, and clattered so loudly that Bernadetta flinched.

Hubert's hands came up against the small of her back, steadying her.

"I am grateful to be a guest in your home," Hubert said.

Bernadetta wanted to say, 'it's not my home'. Or, 'you're not just a guest'. Both felt true, but somehow not allowed.

"I'm glad you're here," Bernadetta said instead.

Steadied by Hubert's hands, she clambered down without incident.

Later that afternoon, she took food and tea to Tomas. He was absorbed in his work as ever. Bernadetta left the tray of food on a table by the door, and did not look too closely at the disarray in the room. She had once dusted and swept, even wiped the windows. Now, Tomas piled his material wherever it suited, and became stern and stormy-faced if Bernadetta walked into the room, as though she might disturb his carefully arranged mess.

Bernadetta always made sure to close the door to the laboratory behind her, and shut away all that it contained; Tomas, and his experiments, and the smell of death. She knew in her mind that Tomas was every bit the guest that Hubert was, and of longer standing. But in the quiet, dusty walls of Varley Manor, he felt more like a festering wound on Bernadetta's peace of mind. As much a part of Varley Manor as a tumor was part of the body it eventually killed.

She convinced herself it did not matter. She had lived with discomfort for so many years in this house, that she had grown used to ignoring it.

Until she couldn't.

* * *

Bernadetta wasn't sure why she woke up in the middle of the night as she did. Perhaps it was another nightmare. Perhaps it was simply the sense of unease that seemed to permeate the manor lately, finally reaching saturation point.

Maybe, more likely, it was the storm outside her window; the strike of lightning, the thunder that made everything in her room rattle. 

She rose from bed, pulling on her house gown, putting on her slippers, and she crept out into the hallways with the same quiet mouse's step that she had become well-versed in during her adolescence. She made her way, as she frequently did nowadays, to Hubert's library.

There was a single lamp on. The book that Hubert had been making his way through when Bernadetta went to bed was, incongruously, on the floor. She picked it up and set it on the side table with a sense of rising dread, and knew that she needed to find Hubert.

Because the convergence of all her fears was in Tomas' laboratory, she made her way there. Down the stairs from the library, to the first floor... avoiding every floorboard that creaked, hand against the wall as she traced a path through the darkness. 

The light was on in the laboratory, even at this time of night, and she could see it through the crack in the door. But then, when wasn't Tomas in the laboratory these days? Bernadetta brought him trays of food and tea, and oftentimes picked the same tray, untouched and gone cold and rapidly spoiled, hours later. 'You don't eat much anymore at my age,' Tomas had excused himself, but then, did he also forego sleep? How could he keep on for so long?

She opened the door and slipped inside, keeping to the shadows as she looked into the laboratory. It was not a surprise what she saw: Hubert on the table, laid out, shirt stripped from his chest to reveal the stitches that held him closed. In the weeks since Bernadetta had sewed them, Hubert had not visibly healed, the way a living body would.

...What was Tomas doing?

He fiddled with a tray of instruments, muttering to himself, and as Bernadetta approached, he must've sensed her, because he turned around.

There was a manic light in his eye, that served him as fuel when food and sleep didn't. Bernadetta felt some image from her nightmares superimposed: of a venomous monster bursting free of Tomas' skin. The frame of this old, frail man seemed too small and ill-fitting to contain all the atrocities he was capable of.

"What are you doing to Hubert?" Bernadetta asked. She might have been brave, for once, but her voice came out faint and frightened.

"Do to him?" Tomas asked, looking amused. "Nothing, my dear. Nothing. Merely taking something back. The crest stone is the difference, you see. It must be why I have found success with this subject, and not the rest--" 

He gestured towards the corpses piled in the corner, the rejected experiments that he could not animate. Bernadetta expected the stench of death to be overwhelming in the room, but it was overridden by the urine-scent of formaldehyde, and the ozone-prickle of magic. He had done something to preserve the corpses, and now they sat in their oozing pile, never rotting as Tomas left them in the open.

He called himself a gravekeeper, was all Bernadetta could think, over and over as she looked at Tomas closely for the first time. His skin hung loose with wrinkles and recent weight loss, and his complexion had grow sallow. Had there always been circles so black around his eyes? Had his hairline receded lately? Had his hands always had that tremor, or was it there before? 

But now that Bernadetta looked, she could see something familiar in his eyes: fear. Tomas was terrified, surrounded by death as he was. This was not scientific fervor, that drove him. This was a kind of desperation.

He was only a sick old man. He had no idea what he was doing. He had never known, and anything he accomplished had been accidental, and beyond his own knowledge. He would mindlessly destroy Hubert, when Hubert was the most miraculous thing he had ever accomplished.

"If you take the crest stone out, won't Hubert die?" Bernadetta asked, inching closer, her hands wringing.

Tomas looked annoyed now.

"It's already dead," the old man sneered. "I told you, replicating the experiment is what matters. We must do so reliably, before we can apply the technique to ourselves." He turned to his tray of instruments then, hands groping until they found a pair of long, thin scissors. 

"Wh-- what if I don't want that for myself?" Bernadetta asked.

Tomas seemed to pause for a moment, regarding the scissors.

"Then you are nothing but a young fool," Tomas replied, "and you will see your folly when you realize the years you had were never enough."

He brandished the scissors, leaned over Hubert to cut his stitches.

Bernadetta's hands found a different tool, then. The shovel by the door, still filthy with dry gravedirt. With a clarity that she hadn't experienced since first arriving to Varley Manor, she hefted it.

Tomas was still judging where to start cutting when the first smack came: the flat of the shovel against the back of his neck. His knees folded and he knocked the tray over--sent instruments flying across the laboratory floor, skittering against the stone. He fell to his knees still clutching the scissors, and a cry gurgled from his throat.

The second blow connected with a meaty crunch, and Tomas fell sprawling to the ground.

And Bernadetta hit again.

And again.

And again.

* * *

In the end, Tomas had been nothing but an old man. No frightening monster slithered out of his sallow skin when it broke open under Bernadetta's shovel.

A transcendent calm fell over Bernadetta as she dropped the shovel. It felt as though she was watching herself from outside her own body as she rifled through drawers to find the smelling salts for Hubert. He woke groggy and uncoordinated, and she had to pull his arm over her shoulders to support his weight as they tottered towards the door. 

The calm felt as fragile as cobwebs, so Bernadetta did not probe it for fear it would melt away and leave her nothing but a gibbering coward instead.

But Hubert's hand on her shoulder gripped so tight that Bernadetta felt herself grounded into her body again.

"What happened?" Hubert slurred, still not quite awake yet. This was likely as close as he'd ever gotten to sleep since he died.

Answers churned like bile in Bernadetta's throat, the taste turning metallic on her tongue--or maybe that was the smell of fresh blood.

"Did he hurt you?" Hubert asked, now awake enough to look down and see Bernadetta's gore-splattered nightgown.

"He didn't hurt anyone," Bernadetta replied. "He's never going to," she added in a whisper, yet sounding all the more firm for it.

Hubert was quiet for a while, in response. But as if he had reached the final station on a long train of thought, he nodded with finality.

"I would kill for some coffee," he said.

Bernadetta started laughing, and couldn't stop until it turned into crying.


End file.
